The Success of The Movement For Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) is too recent an event to permit any firm assessment of changes taking place in the Zambian political system. These are, however, probably weighted in favour of a more democratic regime. A situation has arisen in which the powers of the President and those of a parliamentary opposition hang in the balance. In Africa presidents have tended to gain the upper hand but this may prove not to be the case in Zambia.

Despite their stated commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, liberal democratic states routinely interdict refugees, such as through the use of visa requirements, effectively blocking them from reaching their borders. How do liberal democratic states navigate this contradictory terrain? To answer this question, this article explores situations where normally routine and often invisible interdiction practices break down. Canada's approach to Roma arriving from the Czech Republic and Hungary between 1997 and 2001 is an illuminating example of such breakdown and repair, providing a rare glimpse into how one liberal democratic state manages its own interdiction contradictions.

With The Inauguration Of The Socialist President, Ricardo Lagos, in March 2000 it would appear that the Chilean party system had come full circle since the 1973 coup that unseated the last Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Despite the Chilean military's efforts to eradicate the left during its almost seventeen years in power, a Socialist assumed the presidency only a dozen years after the electoral defeat of the military regime in 1988. In one sense, this success is a testament to the perseverance of the party of Allende, and the party system in general. Nonetheless, the Socialist Party, and indeed the Chilean party system, are quite distinct from the ethos of the Allende years of the early 1970s. At the same time, it is undeniable that there are striking continuities in terms of the number of political parties and patterns of partisan competition. Thus, how should one interpret the extent of transformation and continuity in the Chilean party system?

THE TRANSITION FROM COMMUNIST TOTALITARIANISM TO a democratic socio-political organization and to a market economy system depends on several economic factors (capital, technology, skilled labour force, competent management) and also on political and cultural elements. The political speeches, whether delivered by government or opposition in Romania, underline almost exclusively the financial, technological or political aspects, neglecting quite completely the psycho-sociological dimension of this transitory period. The fact that the economic reforms somehow failed is only partly due to the lack of economic resources or to organizational setbacks. These are, of course, significant and undeniable reasons, but there is one more explanation rather forgotten, and that is the attitude of the Romanian population itself towards economic, social and political changes.

This article investigates the dimension and evolution of the financing of political parties. It focuses on 28 parties in the five major European countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain), analysing the parties’ budgets from 2002 to 2016. The article's assessment shows that the availability of funds increased until the beginning of the Great Recession (2008), and then decreased, mainly due to a decline in public support for parties. Diminished state generosity has led parties to look for different sources of financing: the article shows the proportion of self-funding resources in terms of membership fees and private donations that has sustained the parties’ finances. Finally the article presents a model that helps to explain the shrinking of parties’ income by including parties’ ideological alignment, electoral outcome, presence in government and share of public financing, and countries’ public spending and GDP level, to investigate the plausible causes of the reduction of parties’ income.

An energetic scholarly debate discusses possible reforms of representative democracy. Some support participatory forms of democracy, others a more elite-driven or technocratic democracy. This study contributes to the growing literature on the subject by emphasizing political sophistication as a theoretically relevant predictor of attitudes to democracy: different models of democracy make different demands regarding the political sophistication of citizens. The analysis includes two dimensions and three measures of sophistication: personal sophistication measured as political knowledge and internal efficacy, and impersonal sophistication measured as assessment of others’ political competence. Using the 2011 Finnish National Election Study, we find that perceptions of the sophistication of others have a substantial impact on preferences for political decision-making, and that politically sophisticated people support representative democracy. The analysis shows that perceptions of others’ political competence, which has been largely neglected by previous research, is a both theoretically and empirically relevant predictor of preferences for political decision-making processes.

The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 23 variables from 373 academic articles published between 1969 and 2018. The power-sharing literature, our analysis shows, has witnessed a boom in publications in the last two decades, more than the average publication rate in the social sciences. This review offers a synthesis of how power sharing is theorized, operationalized and studied. We demonstrate that power sharing has generally positive effects, regardless of institutional set-up, post-conflict transitional character and world region. Furthermore, we highlight structural factors that are mostly associated with the success of power sharing. Finally, the review develops a research agenda to guide future scholarly work on power sharing.

IN THE SEVEN YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE COLONELS' dictatorship in Greece, a new Greek party has established firm political roots. With the accession of Greece to the European Community on 1 January 1981, the new parties have been brought into the Western European political orbit, a development which marks the rehabilitation of a political system ostracized by virtue of its period of dictatorship. Unlike Portugal and Spain, however, which also seek membership of the European Community, the Greek period of dictatorship – lasting seven years post-war – represents much more an historical aberration, for Greece not only has an ancient history which saw the birth of democratic government, it also has enjoyed far more democratic than dictatorial governments in its modern period.

This article analyses the impact of government prospects and government participation on party policy preferences. Comparing the content of manifestos of governing and opposition parties in Belgium during three decades, I observed that the relationship of a party to the act of governing influences the content of its manifesto. In that sense, party preferences are not only driven by ideology and vote-seeking arguments but are part of a larger party strategy: parties adapt their electoral platform when they are in government or are willing to enter into it. The conclusion of the article also discusses the literature on government formation. Such literature hypothesizes that parties that are ideologically similar would form a coalition. However, results for the Belgian case demonstrate that parties strategically adapt their electoral platform when wanting to enter the government. Coalitions are made up of parties with similar policy preferences, not because they ‘are’ alike but because parties strategically ‘make’ them alike.

In the twenty-five years since The End of Ideology was published, the concept of ideology has unravelled completely. What is not considered an ideology today? Ideas, ideals, beliefs, creeds, passions, values, Weltanschauungen, religions, political philosophies, moral systems, linguistic discourses — all have been pressed into service. One hears about ‘communism and capitalism as competing ideologies’, and ‘the failure of the United States [before Reagan] to develop an ideology’. In an essay in the Partisan Review, ideology is defined as ‘fantasy cast in the form of assertion’, a loose and associative form of thought, ‘sharing qualities with pornography …’. A front-page essay in the Times Literary Supplement on pre-Christian religious thought talks of the effects of ‘hostile ideologies (i.e. early Epicureanism) on Christian apologists’. And a book on military strategy is entitled The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disaster of 1914.

WRITING A LETTER FROM IRELAND TOUCHES ON CERTAIN sensitivities because Ireland is a geographic unit in search of political expression. There has always been some doubt about political ownership. Between 1800 and 1921 it was, of course, part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Let us say for the present that Ireland now belongs to that small group of political entities - like Korea and Cyprus - which ‘enjoys’ the condition of partition. And that part of Ireland whence this letter is written, Northern Ireland, has been placed in some sort of historical context by a former leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, when he said of it: ‘and now we are sadly the last imperial aspidistra in the British window.’

The 2010–11 Arab uprisings continue to prompt a great deal of discussion. By focusing specifically on Tunisia and Egypt, this article aims to present a more dynamic account of revolutionary moments in these countries. It does so in two ways. First, the changing nature of structures and mechanisms of authoritarian domination over time is explored. Second, the convergences of different social classes and political forces during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are not treated as unique and static occurrences. By showing how the two revolutionary networks gradually emerged and enlarged, a truer picture is thus provided. By doing so, this article aims to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of the two revolutionary outbursts and to the development of the fourth generation of revolutionary studies.

Do western publics make ‘demands’ for environmental policy that they have no desire to see enacted? The thesis that they do has been put forward recently by advocates of the ‘post-ecologist’ paradigm such as Ingolfur Blühdorn. Taking the example of climate change, this article assesses survey results that provide indicative evidence that such ‘simulative’ demands may exist. I suggest that such demands are, however, best explained through conceptual tools available from game-theoretic and rational-actor models of political behaviour, in particular rational ignorance and rational irrationality, rather than with the societal-level accounts preferred by Blühdorn and others.

Morocco has a number of islamic movements that demand the establishment of a truly Islamic society. Most of them sprouted up in the 1970s and caused considerable anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution. But these movements have proven to be less powerful than was once feared — or hoped. After describing the main tendencies represented by these groups, I shall suggest some possible reasons for their political inefficacy.

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed records of war service for all members of parliament during two recent terms in Croatia. We demonstrate not only that veteran politicians talk about war differently from their non-veteran counterparts, but also that the sentiment of war-related political discourse is highly dependent on the speaker's exposure to combat and ideological orientation. These results improve our understanding of the representational role played by combat veterans, as well as of the link between descriptive and substantive representation of vulnerable groups in post-war societies.

IBN KHALDUN, LIKE EMILE DURKHEIM, IS PRIMARILY A THEORIST OF social cohesion. His central problem is - what is it that keeps men together in society? What is it that leads them to idendy with a sacid group, to accept and observe its norms, to subordinate their own individual interests to it, in some measure to accept the authority of its leaders, to think its thoughts and to internalize its aims? This is a question which sociologists, moralists and political osophers share. One of the interesting traits of Ibn Khaldun owever is the extent to which he is a sociologist rather than a moralist: modern sociologists may preach Wertfreiheit, he ractised it. Even when, as a kind of Maghrebin Machiavelli, he offers advice to princes, it is basically technical advice on points of detail, or on the wisdom of knowing things for what they are: but when it comes to the basic features of the social system, he indulges in no preaching. No advice is offered to the social cosmos as to how it should comport itself. Things are as they are. The thinker's job is to understand them, not to change them. Marx's contrary opinion would have astonished Ibn Khaldun. In this sense, Ibn Khaldun is more positivistic than Durkheim, whose thought is far more often at the service of values and of the concern with social renovation.

Pushed by technological, cultural and related political drivers, a ‘new plebiscitary democracy’ is emerging which challenges established electoral democracy as well as variants of deliberative democracy. The new plebiscitary democracy reinvents and radicalizes longer-existing methods (initiative, referendum, recall, primary, petition, poll) with new tools and applications (mostly digital). It comes with a comparatively thin conceptualization of democracy, invoking the bare notion of a demos whose aggregated will is to steer actors and issues in public governance in a straight majoritarian way. In addition to unravelling the reinvented logic of plebiscitary democracy in conceptual terms, this article fleshes out an empirically informed matrix of emerging formats, distinguishing between votations that are ‘political-leader’ and ‘public-issue’ oriented on the one hand, and ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ initiated on the other hand. Relatedly, it proposes an agenda for systematic research into the various guises, drivers and implications of the new plebiscitary democracy. Finally, it reflects on possible objections to the argumentation.

THE THEME I PROPOSE TO TREAT HERE RUNS LIKE A PARALLEL tributary to the mainstream of Giovanni Sartori's theme: ‘We are living above and beyond our intelligence’. But while Sartori concentrates his attention on the pros and cons of ‘political engineering’ in the modern society, its feasibility and cost benefits, I concentrate on the question which can be summarily formulated as follows: ‘can modern political judgment itself, i.e. before it sets political engineering, or indeed policy-making, in motion, comprehend (in the double meaning of the expression) the issues upon which it should be exerted in their individual esotericism and in their collective array?’ But before starting to examine this question, I must make a few caveats.

Although the internet is severely censored in China, negative reporting and critical deliberations of political institutions and policy issues, especially low-profile ones, have been abundant in cyberspace. Given such a mixed pattern of online information, this study explores the complexity of the effect of the internet on regime support by parsing it into direct effect and indirect effect. It argues that the internet indirectly erodes its viewers’ overall support for the authoritarian regime by decreasing their evaluation of government performance. The findings from a mediation analysis of a Beijing sample support this argument. The result of one analysis also indicates that the direct effect of internet use on regime support can be positive. Such findings about the effect of the internet in China help advance our understanding of both political and theoretical implications of the spread of the internet in authoritarian countries.